Hi,

I just built a custom desktop with the latest XFCE-4.4rc1 built from
source. Life would be easier if my system locales were all utf-8 instead
of latin-1... but there's a note in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh somehow
discouraging this.

Have any of you guys switched to utf-8? With what results? Major or minor
tweaks to get everything displayed correctly?

Cheers,

Niki Kovacs

On 2006-10-31, Niki Kovacs <mickey@mouse.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just built a custom desktop with the latest XFCE-4.4rc1 built from
> source. Life would be easier if my system locales were all utf-8 instead
> of latin-1... but there's a note in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh somehow
> discouraging this.
>
> Have any of you guys switched to utf-8? With what results? Major or minor
> tweaks to get everything displayed correctly?

I'm using en_US.utf-8 since a year or so and all is ok. I remember using
10.2 xfce and some console based software (mutt to name one) without
problems. The only application I use which already have some issue is slrn...

Gufo
--
,___, Armageddon means never having to say you're sorry.
(9v9)
(_^((\ .: May the owl be with you :.
-^-"-"-\\-^- http://gufo.dontexist.org

Niki Kovacs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just built a custom desktop with the latest XFCE-4.4rc1 built from
> source. Life would be easier if my system locales were all utf-8 instead
> of latin-1... but there's a note in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh somehow
> discouraging this.
>
> Have any of you guys switched to utf-8? With what results? Major or minor
> tweaks to get everything displayed correctly?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Niki Kovacs

I've tried utf-8 but I had small problems with it (xfig has problems
with it as well as the linux console); otherwise it seems to run fine.
But latin1 does not give me any problems at all for the moment, so I
prefer to stick with it (I use both French and English, which latin1
support, I think utf-8 might be more interesting for people which handle
several languages that cannot be encoded in the same locale).

Olive

Olive wrote:

> I've tried utf-8 but I had small problems with it (xfig has problems
> with it as well as the linux console); otherwise it seems to run fine.
> But latin1 does not give me any problems at all for the moment, so I
> prefer to stick with it (I use both French and English, which latin1
> support, I think utf-8 might be more interesting for people which handle
> several languages that cannot be encoded in the same locale).

It depends on what you'r doing. Fedora uses UTF-8. If I make a ssh
connection to a fedora system I'll witch to UTF-8 myself. Otherwise is
even a plain english manpage not properly displayed. Quoting chars
will make havoc for instance.

Kees.

--
Kees Theunissen.

> I just built a custom desktop with the latest XFCE-4.4rc1 built from
> source. Life would be easier if my system locales were all utf-8 instead
> of latin-1... but there's a note in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh somehow
> discouraging this.
>
> Have any of you guys switched to utf-8? With what results? Major or minor
> tweaks to get everything displayed correctly?

I've been using UTF-8 for several years now.
Basically, you won't have problems in Qt, GTK2 and ncursesw applications.
GTK1, some plain X based, slang and ncurses applications will have problems.
Most of the console GNU utils don't care or will work ok.

BTW there's also slang2 now that should support Unicode and UTF-8, and a
slrn version patched for slang2.. I haven't tried it but I've seen reports
that it works fine.

--
damjan

On 2006-11-01, Damjan <gdamjan@gmail.com> wrote:
> BTW there's also slang2 now that should support Unicode and UTF-8, and a
> slrn version patched for slang2.. I haven't tried it but I've seen reports
> that it works fine.

I'm using slrn-0.9.8.1p2 as in debian experimental. It's not perfect,
some characters like è or Ã* and some utf-8 only symbols sometimes are
displayed and sometimes are substituted with <E5>,<F4> and similar.

If you want you can download my slackbuild for slrn:
http://gufo.dontexist.org/builds/Slrn.php
it's basically the slackware's one, with little modification to suit the
way debian rolls its source tarballs.

Gufo
--
,___, Armageddon means never having to say you're sorry.
(9v9)
(_^((\ .: May the owl be with you :.
-^-"-"-\\-^- http://gufo.dontexist.org

> It depends on what you'r doing. Fedora uses UTF-8. If I make a ssh
> connection to a fedora system I'll witch to UTF-8 myself. Otherwise is
> even a plain english manpage not properly displayed. Quoting chars
> will make havoc for instance.

Usually I configure the system on which I make ssh to use latin1 (this
is quite easy). But I admit that whenever I can, I use just plain ASCII
7bit: for example I never put an accent in a filename, even if this
filename is in French (my mother language).

Olive